In the seventies , when Bengal was going through a period of insurgency, – the movement that came to be known as Naxalism, the intellectual fuel for this came from the unemployed students of Bengal’s many universities. Why, one may ask, did this group of educated young men and women, choose this route of violence one may ask …. And in the process create a movement that has now become part of Bengal modern folk lore after the Bengal famine and the partition stories.
Part of the reason that this movement happened is that Bengalis rarely are a migratory species and so a bulk of them stay there. After all there is no place like him and no place like Sonar Bangla… and so only a fool would even think of migrating. There is this deep attachment to roots that a Bengali has that one not a Bengali can only envy; even if it is a bit like fool’s gold.
For the thing is that if nothing much happens in Bengal today, nothing at all was happening there in the seventies… while societies evolve and progress, West Bengal was a living study of retrogression and regression. So what does a young man who is educated and cannot farm the land any more and cannot find work of his “kind” any more and will not migrate to any other part of the country do? Dreaming and eulogizing about revolutions is as good an idea as any to convince yourself that life has a meaning and a purpose that gives it a meaning.
Of late migration has often being suggested as a big reason for the violence that is brewing in mega cities like Mumbai where understandably the infra structure is understandably creaking under their weight. These migrants are not bringing in money and so they are perceived to be a burden. These poor, often illiterate and uncouth people should stay where they belong, in their poverty and not add to the city’s burdens.
There is another town in another state that was profiled in India Today recently. Azamgarh, apparently the mother of all towns birthing dons and goons – a place where nothing again happens that allows you to be productively occupied. So part of its population goes to work in the Middle East and another –significant chunk stays back in town and it would seem learn to hear another call. The call to fight, the call to fire, the call to kill. It would seem blithely that those who migrated have done better for themselves than those who stayed back and learnt only to die and to make others die too.
It is easy to dismiss this as the problem of Kolkata and the problem of Azamgarh. But wait a minute…. The flames of Naxalism that the educated youth of Bengal who found themselves in a trap started have still not got extinguished. Migration wasn’t an issue directly there, but it was a fact that a large majority of Bengali young people remained attached to their home and hearth and chose not to drive off to other pastures. They chose to look for opportunities in their own mother land that didn’t exist and after disillusionment set in… they set in forth a series of events that are rocking the country till now.
The same with Azamgarh. Azamgarh’s poverty and backwardness are no more the problems of a district or a state… the discontent that breeds in their lanes and by lanes can and does ripple across the nation, oblivious of boundaries and check posts? We as a nation need to decide on the nature of migrants that we wish to have in our perimeters – hard working, disciplined migrants who work… indeed very hard for the pittance that they still make, even if they have displaced or the suave, polished, educated intellectual of the left wing or the right wing, who plants bombs and grenades under our buses and trains and create devastation in our already stressed out lives. One kind of migrant comes knocking at our door seeking admittance and we throw them out. Another kind blasts their way into our lives and brings to our knees and all we can do is froth at the mouth and make blood curdling “ khoon pey jayenge” type hyper bolic statements. We just need to choose and not have choices enforced on us.
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